Mon, Apr 08, 2002 page17

• Second runway opens at Narita

  • AFP
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  With barely six weeks until the start of the World Cup, Tokyo's Narita airport will formally open its long overdue second runway on April 18 to cope with an expected influx of fans and tourists.

  It also ends 20 years of fierce opposition by local residents.

  "Ever since Narita airport was commissioned in 1978, the second runway has been planned, but the purchase of land did not go smoothly. The conflict lasted for almost 20 years," said Toru Nakamura, president and CEO of the Narita Airport Authority (NAA), during a press tour of the airport.

  

  A jetliner flies over a new runaway at New Tokyo International Airport at Narita, during a press preview last Thursday.

  PHOTO: AFP

  Although initially intended to be 2,500m long, the new runway only extends for 2,180m, too short for the biggest long-haul super jumbo jets such as the Boeing 747.

  The situation is a legacy of the continued refusal of two farmers to sell or rent their land to the NAA.

  Narita's original runway is 4,000m.

  During the 1970s and 1980s, a protest movement led by local rice farmers and landowners and supported by student radicals emerged in Narita.

  "At one stage, protests against Narita became almost a symbol of protest against the establishment," said Tsuneaki Iki, executive adviser to Nakamura, of the confrontations which often resulted in pitched battles between thousands of left-wing protesters wielding bamboo lances and the police.

  Over the years, the sometimes violent protests resulted in the deaths of four police officers.

  Iki acknowledged the authorities had handled the issue clumsily by resorting to a compulsory land-acquisition policy.

  "In 1993, the government and the NAA announced that they would not resort to any purchase without consent ... Farmers started to sell their land from around 1994 or 1995," he said.

  Construction of the second runway finally began in 1999.

  With only one runway, Narita was already operating at full capacity, with no night-time flights allowed and take-offs and landings only two minutes apart at peak times, NAA officials said.

  Nakamura did not disclose the precise cost of the runway, saying only that construction ran to "several tens of billions of yen."

  On top of that another ?160 billion (US$1.2 billion) is slated to be spent on a new express rail link connecting Narita and central Tokyo. The railway line is scheduled to go into service in 2010.

  Aside from the month-long Korea-Japan World Cup tournament which starts on May 31, Nakamura said, "The number of Japanese tourists going abroad is increasing, and we'll see demand from Asian areas increasing as the economies of those countries develop."

  The need for the second runway is illustrated by the fact that when it opens in 10 days' time, 67 percent of the 126 daily takeoff and landing slots will already be accounted for, rising to 87 percent by October.

  NAA is also planning to expand connecting domestic flight services from Narita.

  "Passengers from international flights will not have to go to, Haneda, Tokyo's domestic flight airport, to fly to other Japanese cities," Nakamura said.

  Smaller capacity aircraft would also be able to use the new runway.

  The governor of Chiba prefecture, Akiko Domoto, called the completion of the new runway a "remarkable achievement for Narita airport and a very important event for Chiba prefecture."

  The number of flights will increase by around 50 percent to 200,000 a year by 2007, boosting passenger numbers from 26 million to 41 million annually, while cargo traffic would rise from 1.8 million tons to 2.3 million tons, she said.
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